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To the Editor: In his editorial¹ regarding treatment decisions for seriously ill newborns, Dr Fost distorts our prior study² by claiming that "a major medical center reported that standard treatment was withheld from more than half of a cohort of infants referred with spina bifida." Our process was undertaken only after several mothers of older children told us that they wished that someone had taken the time to discuss with them the long-term implications of performing surgery on their newborns with spina bifida. The common theme was that if they had been better informed, they would never have agreed to the surgery. We thus set up a program to inform parents, to the best of our ability, of the outlooks for their infants both with and without surgery.

These decisions were not, as Fost states, "driven by directive counseling by the infants' physician, with or without the consent of the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Decisions Regarding Treatment of Seriously Ill Newborns
Norman Fost
JAMA. 1999;281(21):2041-2043.
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